Sunday Links, March 3, 2013

The winners of the Kitschies have been announced. That Red Tentacle looks like an amazing prize, and the expression on Nick Harkaway’s face is perfectly British (he won for Angelmaker). Lavie Tidhar, who won the Black Tentacle, has some thoughts about the blog for which he won the award and the diversity — or lack thereof — in the science fiction and fantasy field.

If you’re searching for something good to read, you might try the Underrated Books Project. There are plenty of books in the fantasy section that I’ve never heard of, and none that I’ve read. It seems like an interesting place to start reading.

I’m already a member of LibraryThing and GoodReads; do I really need to join SocialBook as well? Apparently, yes, if I want to be part of the next big thing: social reading. I can’t say I want to read along, literally line by line, with anyone else; just give me a book and some quiet and a goodly chunk of time and I’m happy. But some folks seem to want to socialize every minute. More power to ‘em, but is that really me? Or you?

Emotional engagement in one’s reading might well make one more empathetic, >a href=http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2013/02/21/wrapped-up-in-a-book-the-role-of-emotional-engagement-in-reading/>according to a recent study. It doesn’t work for nonfiction, and doesn’t work if the book simply skips right off your critical armor, but if you’re crying at the end of a book, you’ll be a somewhat nicer person afterwards.

Yikes! The latest Kindle update could erase everything from your library. The bug has apparently been fixed, but without complete backup I wouldn’t risk it in any event — too many books would go missing in a worst case scenario. Because yes, I seem to be collecting ebooks as well as real books. You can never have too many. And hey, if you can’t die until you’ve read all your books, I’m going to live forever. Keep me company, won’t you?